Failed to start Login service after upgrade to 17.10

I launched the upgrade process to 17.10 when asked for it (on 17.04).

My screen was locked (and off) during the download of the packages but it flashed by waking sometimes (I was in the dark so I noticed that).

Then an hour later, I wanted to see how the upgrade went but I couldn't login anymore. My password was refused (but I could login without problem on a console Ctrl-Alt-F1) so I guess something was wrong with lightDM ?

So I rebooted, and now the boot process fails with Failed to start Login service which is not related to lightDM anymore but systemd-logind.service.

Edit: systemd-logind log shows that:

Failed to add match for JobRemoved: Connection timed out
Failed to fully start daemon: Connectin timed out
systemd-logind.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=1/FAILURE
Stopped Login Service.
systemd-logind.service: Unit entered failed state.
systemd-logind.serivce: Failed with result 'exit-code'.

I can't find much about this on the net

Solution 1:

So in fact I must have broken the installation process.

From within a chroot, I run dpkg --configure -a as asked by apt and I was finally able to boot after a reboot.

Everything seems fine at first sight but I think I am good for a complete reinstall nonetheless.

So this leads to the originial problem. Why couldn't I login after I started the upgrade process ??? This is why I rebooted inthe first place.

Solution 2:

Today I had very similar problem. In my case I saw the login screen, but was unable to even enter my password. It immediately reacted with Authentication failure (or something like that) to any key press or mouse hit.

I think this is related to the changes introduced with Ubuntu 17.10, specifically:

• The Ubuntu Desktop now uses GNOME instead of Unity.
• GDM has replaced LightDM as the default display manager. The login screen now uses virtual terminal 1 instead of virtual terminal 7.

I had to enter to recovery mode after reboot. And I also had to run dpkg --configure -a, but several times. Possibly it is related to disabled networking and I saw it was unable to stop/start the NetworkManager service. So I needed to kill this and some other services-related configurations with Ctrl-C and restart dpkg.